‘Little Separatism’: Nationalism and Russia’s Ukrainian Policy before 1917

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The traditional ‘Little Russian’ patriotism was gradually giving way to the ideas of modern Ukrainian nationalism.

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By Dr. Alexei Miller
Professor of History
Central European University

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Introduction

An important milestone in East European history was the Cossack uprising of 1648 led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky. The subsequent union between the Cossack Hetmanate and the Muscovite Tsarist Empire changed the relation of forces between Moscow and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and laid the foundation for a gradual westward expansion of the Russian Empire. In the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Hetmanate and Sloboda Ukraine, which gradually acquired the name “Little Russia,” were incorporated ever more closely into the Russian Empire. The administrative autonomy of the Hetmanate was continuously restricted and, under Catherine the Great, formally abolished. The last traces of this autonomy (the Little Russian Collegium) disappeared in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

The religious elite of the Hetmanate became prominent in the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church already in the eighteenth century. The Cossack starshyna (officer caste) not only became a regional elite within the empire but was gradually incorporated into the Russian nobility. Its noble status was secured at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, which is probably why its members offered no resistance to the abolition of regional autonomy.¹

Representatives of the Kyivan clergy (Teofan Prokopovych/Feofan Prokopovich) played a large role in the transformation of the Muscovite Tsardom into the Russian Empire, as well as in shaping Russian historical myth and a Russian image of national territory (Inokentii Gizel, author of the Synopsis).² Imperial policy turned the Cossack starshyna into part of the imperial nobility. With the opening of universities in Kharkiv (Kharkov) (1804) and Kyiv (Kiev) (1834), conditions were created at the beginning of the nineteenth century for the emergence of a local intelligentsia in whose ranks Ukrainian national ideas would ripen. The partition of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century eliminated the Dnipro (Dnieper) border, the existence of which for more than a century and a half had left deep marks on the development of the Ukrainian lands.³ The subsequent movements of population, especially into New Russia,⁴ annexed at the end of the eighteenth century, created in many respects the conditions for the emergence of our present-day conception of Ukrainian national territory.

Following the Polish uprising of 1830–31, the Southwestern Province became a theater of conflict between the Russian Empire and the Polish nobility (szlachta), each attempting to influence the process of identity formation of the numerically dominant Little Russian/Ukrainian population. The Russian historical narrative had already, in the 1820s and 1830s, formulated the conception that they were part of the “Russian” population. The thesis that the Little Russians and Great Russians together belonged to the Russian nation was the ideological foundation of the policy that aimed to undermine Polish cultural influence in these lands.

In the 1840s and into the 1860s, the traditional Little Russian patriotism of the traditional elite was gradually giving way to the ideas of modern Ukrainian nationalism. The first instance of this was the narrow circle of the secret Brotherhood of SS. Cyril and Methodius, discovered by the authorities in 1847. It was followed in the 1860s by the milieu of the Kyiv Hromada (Community) and the editors of the St. Petersburg Osnova (Foundation, 1861–62). Most Russian officials and members of the Russian public perceived emerging Ukrainian nationalism as a threat not only to the territorial integrity of the empire but also to the construction of a Russian nation.⁵ This occurred against the background of the Polish uprising of 1863–64 and the abolition of serfdom in 1861, all of which added a social dimension to the problem. In 1847–48, the Russian government considered general restrictions unnecessary and limited itself to exiling the few members of the Brotherhood. It was only in the late 1850s and early 1860s that such measures began to be enforced. In 1859, as a defense against Polish influence, the use of the Latin alphabet (“Polish letters”) was forbidden for the Russian language, including the “Little Russian and White Russian dialects.” This decree also reflected a growing concern about the possible influence of Vienna on the Little Russians. The argument for the ban was that Vienna had attempted to introduce the Latin alphabet among the Galician Ruthenians.⁶ In July 1863, half a year after the beginning of the Polish uprising, the minister of internal affairs, Petr Valuev, issued a circular forbidding the publication of books for the common people in the Ukrainian language, especially primary school books and Holy Scripture.⁷ The officials thus opened the door to the use of administrative methods as a way of combating the emancipation of the Ukrainian language, in other words, to a policy of assimilation by means of prohibiting the Ukrainian language in education. In the short term, these measures were very effective. Support for the Ukrainian movement declined until the 1870s.

When the governor of the Kyiv gubernia from 1873 to 1875, Aleksandr M. Dondukov-Korsakov, found himself confronted by a new wave of the Ukrainian movement, he attempted to “tame” it rather than repress it. He offered Ukrainian activists certain possibilities for legal activity in the Russian Imperial Geographical Society and in the newspaper Kievskii telegraf (Kyiv Telegraph). This policy was initiated without the support of St. Petersburg, which made it possible for opponents of the Ukrainian activists in Kyiv, who thought of themselves as Little Russians, to persuade the bureaucracy in St. Petersburg in 1875 of the need to intervene. A commission was established to deal with the Ukrainian question. After complex internal wrangling in the upper levels of the tsarist bureaucracy, the so-called Ukase of Ems was issued, a series of instructions to different officials, signed by the tsar, on combating the Ukrainian movement.⁸ Among other measures, the prohibition of Ukrainian books issued in 1863 was strengthened and extended to the theater. As in 1863, there was no unanimity among the top levels of the bureaucracy about the adequacy of these measures. The opponents of the Ukrainian movement among the Little Russians in Kyiv once again played an important role.⁹ In 1880 the governor of the Kyiv gubernia, Mikhail Chertkov, the governor of the Kharkiv gubernia, Dondukov-Korsakov, and Senator Aleksandr A. Polovtsov attempted to fundamentally moderate aspects of the Ukase of Ems, since it had proved to be counterproductive. Unlike in 1863, there was no decline in the activities of the Ukrainian movement. Instead, it had spread into Galicia, which was ruled by the Habsburgs. In the early 1880s, the Austro-Hungarian authorities and the Polish elite in Galicia had taken repressive action against the Russophile elements and started to promote pro-Ukrainian sentiment among the Ruthenian population of Eastern Galicia. The assassination of Alexander II put an end to attempts to revise the Ukase of Ems. The new commission on the Ukrainian question, which was supposed to draft a new policy, now met in completely different circumstances, under a new leadership, and made very few slightly moderating changes to the harshest prohibitions of 1876.

In the 1860s and 1870s, Russian discourse on the Ukrainian problem was consolidated. In this discourse, “Ukrainophilism” or “Little Russian separatism” stood for Ukrainian nationalism. In the 1870s, officials persisted in speaking of a Little Russian “dialect,” foiling any plans for the creation of a Ukrainian “literary language” that could have replaced Russian as the language of education and high culture. Officials also continued to refer to “Little Russians,” seen as a branch of the Russian nation, and considered “Ukrainian” an invention of anti-Russian forces. The unity of Little Russia, White Russia, and Great Russia was seen as the backbone of imperial strength and unity, analogous to the consolidation of the British, French, and German nations within their respective empires. This nationalist discourse was shared and actively promoted by those who saw themselves as Little Russians. The front line in the bitter struggle over the concepts “Little Russian/Ukrainian,” “Little Russia/Ukraine,” and “language/dialect” ran not between Great Russians and Ukrainians but between Great Russians and Little Russians on the one side and Ukrainians on the other. This struggle reflected the conflict between the different identity strategies chosen by various groups of educated and politically active people in Ukraine/Little Russia.¹⁰

Socioeconomic Developments in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

In the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, Russia experienced a period of intensive social and economic transformation. This had profound consequences for the development of the identity of different groups in Ukraine and for the attitude of political forces to the Ukrainian question. Migratory movements played an important role in all phases of development of the Russian Empire. They had a major influence on the processes of assimilation, shaping both the space of the empire and ideas about national territories. New Russia was among the main destinations for urban and rural migration in the nineteenth century. In the period between 1782 and 1858, around 1.5 million people, including serfs, migrated to this region. Between 1870 and 1896, the number of migrants remained high, 1.45 million. The end result of these migratory movements was that, at the end of the nineteenth century, Little Russians/Ukrainians made up about half the population of New Russia, while Great Russians constituted about 20 percent. It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Siberia became the main destination for peasant migration, that the number of migrants to New Russia sank considerably (333,000 between 1897 and 1915).¹¹ As a result of this intensive migration, New Russia was claimed by Ukrainian nationalists as part of Ukrainian territory.

The abolition of serfdom opened up potentially great migration opportunities for the Ukrainian peasants, who suffered from an acute shortage of land. Until the 1890s, the government had reservations about peasant migration from the Southwestern Province because it feared a weakening of the Russian element vis-à-vis the “Polish threat.” In 1879, there was even a secret instruction to the governors of the Kyiv and Vilnius gubernias to prevent peasant migration.¹² A report from Senator Polovtsov concerning a revision of the Chernihiv (Chernigov) gubernia in 1880 speaks of the “relatively strong urge of the peasants to migrate” and measures to “reduce the harmful effects” of this situation.¹³ It was not until 1881 that the government issued “Provisional Regulations for Migration of Peasants on Free Land.” This document, however, was not published, and the peasantry was not informed for fear of provoking mass migration.¹⁴ Mass migration of Little Russian peasants from Ukraine developed at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Before 1858, there were practically no Ukrainians/Little Russians in the Steppe province, but at the end of the nineteenth century there were already about 100,000. By 1917, as a result of Prime Minister Petr Stolypin’s resettlement program, there were 800,000.¹⁵ There was a similar development in the regions beyond the Urals. Before 1858 there were also practically no Little Russians in Western Siberia, but there were 137,000 at the time of the census of 1897. In Eastern Siberia there were 25,000 Ukrainians and, in the Far East, 61,000. By 1917, the number of Ukrainians in Western Siberia was 375,000, with 427,000 in Eastern Siberia and 427,000 in the Far East. In the Volga region in 1897 there were more than 545,000 Ukrainians. Altogether 2.5 million Ukrainians, that is, about 10 percent of the entire Ukrainian/Little Russian population, were living in areas that were territorially detached from Ukrainian gubernias.¹⁶ In 1917, the number of Ukrainians living in gubernias bordering present-day Ukraine, in Tambov, Kursk, Voronezh, and Orel, was 2 million, with another 2 million living in the regions of Kuban, Tver, and Stavropol.¹⁷ In regions with mixed populations of Great and Little Russians, the assimilation of Little Russians accelerated. In the census of 1926, at the height of the korenizatsiia (indigenization), when claiming non-Russian origins might well have proved advantageous, half the Little Russians in the Far East gave Russian as their mother tongue.¹⁸ According to reliable estimates of Soviet demographers in the 1980s, 1.5 million Little Russians had “become Russian” in the second half of the nineteenth century.¹⁹

From the 1860s, Russia saw rapid urbanization and industrialization. In 1860, Kyiv had 55,000 residents (just 10,000 more than in 1840), Kharkiv had 50,000, and Odesa (Odessa) 112,000. By 1874 the population of Kyiv had grown to 127,000. By 1881 the population of Kharkiv had risen to 128,000, and that of Odesa to 220,000. In 1860 Lviv (Lemberg, Lwów), with 60,000 residents, was the second-largest city after Odesa on the territory of present-day Ukraine. At the beginning of the 1880s, when the population of Lviv had grown to 70,000, it was also behind Kyiv and Kharkiv.²⁰ The growing cities and industrial areas became melting pots. At the time of the census in 1897, in the sixteen cities with more than 50,000 residents in the part of Ukraine that was in the Russian Empire, it was only in Poltava that more than half the population gave Little Russian as their mother tongue, even though more than 80 percent of the urban population of Ukraine, according to the same census, came from the gubernia in which their city was located.²¹ This percentage increases when we take into account those who came from neighboring Ukrainian gubernias.

There was increased migration at the end of the nineteenth century as a result of industrial development. One of the main destinations was the Donbas, where coal mining started at the end of the 1890s. At the time of the census of 1897, when the industrial development of this region was just beginning, the population was 1,136,000, of whom 62.5 percent (710,000) were Ukrainian/Little Russian and 24.2 percent were Great Russian. This was similar to the process of Anglicization of South Wales in the nineteenth century.

The rail network in Ukraine increased threefold between 1865 and 1875 and grew at a rapid pace after that. In a memorandum to Alexander II written in 1864, Baron Pavel P. Korf clearly stated the consequences of this:

“The Little Russian people today see the tsar as their bond with Russia and religion as their affinity with Russia; this bond and affinity will become stronger and inseparable…. The route to this is the railway…. It is not just goods that travel by rail but also books, ideas, customs and attitudes…. Great Russian and Little Russian capital, Great Russian and Little Russian ideas, attitudes and customs will blend, and these two already close peoples will become very much alike. Then just let the Ukrainophiles preach to the people about Ukraine, about their struggles for independence and their glorious Hetmanate, even if they do it with the fiery verses of their Shevchenko.”²²

The idea that social and economic developments would promote assimilation was widely shared by Russian and Ukrainian politicians. Of course, different conclusions were drawn from this. Many Russian politicians and officials thought that there was no need for political or administrative measures to promote the assimilation of the Little Russians; that things should be “left to take their natural course.” This partly explains why so little attention was paid to the development of elementary schools in the Ukrainian gubernias. In the second half of the nineteenth century, there was little progress in the development of elementary schools in the whole empire. There was practically no increase in state expenditure for peasant schools between 1862 and 1895. Only 11.3 percent of the cost of elementary schools was covered by the state budget. The peasants themselves contributed three times that amount, and the zemstvo administration bore 43.4 percent of the costs. In the Southwestern Province, where there were no zemstvos before 1911, the situation was much worse. In gubernias without zemstvos, the school budget was one-third less.²³ It was not until the reign of Nicholas II that state expenditure for elementary schooling was substantially increased. By the outbreak of the First World War, Russia was about to introduce compulsory education. In this situation, the representatives of the Ukrainian movement found it necessary, as long as the assimilation process had not yet gone too far, to intensify their activities to whatever extent possible.²⁴

Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism after the Revolution of 1905

The Revolution of 1905 brought about fundamental changes both in the political system of the Russian Empire and in the sphere of local politics. With political organizations no longer prohibited, legally competing political forces emerged at both local and state level in elections to the city dumas and the State Duma, the newly created imperial parliament. In Kyiv, this political battle was reflected in the pages of Russian and Ukrainian newspapers, since the abolition of censorship in Ukraine also meant the abolition of restrictions on the use of the Ukrainian language in the press.

In the years 1906–8 the Ukrainian movement was on the upswing. In 1906 practically every city had its Ukrainian newspaper. By 1908, only one of those daily papers remained, Rada (Council) in Kyiv.²⁵ One of the reasons for this was administrative pressure from officials who imposed penalties for offenses against press law. But finances were the main reason for the loss of the Ukrainian provincial press. Even the Kyiv Rada, over many years, was unable to find more than two thousand subscribers and was only able to survive thanks to generous help from Yevhen Chykalenko and the existence of a single rich sponsor, Vasyl Symyrenko, who covered the annual deficit. Chykalenko described the situation in 1909 in these words:

“The average urban resident who speaks the peasant Ukrainian language to a greater or lesser degree would not subscribe to our paper because he understands the Russian papers better and, what’s more, those papers give him more news and news that is more up-to-date.”²⁶

The Society of Ukrainian Progressives (Tovarystvo ukraïns’kykh postupovtsiv, TUP),²⁷ founded in 1908, became a coordinating center for Ukrainian cultural and political organizations. Among the organizations linked to the TUP were the hromady (communities), semilegal groups of intelligentsia founded in the 1860s in a number of cities, and the cultural organization Prosvita (Enlightenment), which opened branches in a number of gubernias and cities immediately after the revolution. Prosvita̕s influence was not equally strong everywhere. While it had the support of an extensive network of organizations in the Kyiv, Poltava, and Chernihiv gubernias, it had hardly any influence in other areas (Volhynia, Odesa, Kherson, Donbas).²⁸

In 1908, the TUP initiated a bill signed by thirty-seven members of the State Duma to introduce the Ukrainian language in schools. The Kyiv Club of Russian Nationalists (KCRN),²⁹ founded that same year by Anatolii Savenko and Dmitrii Pikhno under the patronage of Prime Minister Stolypin, agitated against the draft with the result that it was not even placed on the agenda of the Duma.³⁰ Ukraine, especially Kyiv, thus became a battleground between two nationalisms deeply rooted there. As a consequence of a campaign initiated by the KCRN, local branches of Prosvita in the big cities were closed by the administration in 1910. In that same year, the KCRN celebrated its victory in elections to the Kyiv city duma, where it commanded a decisive majority.³¹ It played a leading role among the Russian nationalists who formed the All-Russian National Union in 1911. At the start of the First World War, the KCRN, which at that time had around three thousand signed-up members, changed its name to Progressive Club of Russian Nationalists and joined the Progressive Bloc.

The most important journalistic opponent of Rada was Kievlianin (The Kyivan), which was close to the KCRN and continued the anti-Ukrainian line it had promoted since the 1870s. What was peculiar about the situation in Kyiv was that the Ukrainian activists and the Little Russian anti-Ukrainians were both directing their propaganda toward the same group, whose members identified themselves as Malorossy (Little Russians) or Khokhly. They had no fixed identity or political consciousness, and both sides wanted to turn them into nationalists, the one Ukrainian, the other Russian. In other words, the battle for the hearts and minds of individuals had begun and was added to the typical nineteenth-century conflict over abstract concepts such as Maloross or Ukrainian.

It corresponded to the logic of this struggle that both camps, whose supporters came from the same milieu and often knew one another personally, attempted to portray the other side in the darkest colors. The KCRN, in the discourse of Rada, was made up of Black Hundreds, arch-reactionaries, and traitors to their own nation.³² In KCRN discourse, the circle around Rada and the TUP were Mazepintsy,³³ renegades, separatists, Russophobes, and agents of foreign powers, primarily Poland, but also Austria-Hungary and the German Empire.³⁴ While Rada considered the anti-Ukrainian Little Russians to be thoroughly reactionary, which was far from being the case, Kievlianin equally incorrectly described the Ukrainian nationalists as cosmopolitans, socialists, and unprincipled revolutionaries.³⁵

The situation was different, however, when both sides spoke about the unpoliticized Little Russians. For the Ukrainians, these were victims of Russification, “unconscious Ukrainians” who had to be saved for the Ukrainian nation.³⁶ The Ukrainian discourse shared the Western view of the Russians as a half-wild Asiatic people incapable of living a European style of life. Politically, the eastern type of Great Russian was seen as incapable of democratically restructuring the state and recognizing the rights of minorities. This applied, moreover, not just to the advocates of monarchic order but also to the ally of the Ukrainian nationalists, the Constitutional Democratic (Cadet) Party. Yevhen Chykalenko, the leader of the TUP, wrote in his journal of Pavel Miliukov, the leader of the Cadets:

“Twist it how you will, in the soul of every Katsap,³⁷ even the most progressive of them, there sits a centralist.”³⁸

The economic position of Russian Ukraine was described as colonial.³⁹ The aspiration of many Little Russians to be closer to the Great Russians and their culture was dismissed as an error resulting from the traumas caused by enforced Russification. It was the credo of Chykalenko and the other Ukrainian nationalists that “all the Ruthenians, Little Russians, and Khokhly on the territory from the San to the Don should become nationally conscious Ukrainians.”⁴⁰

For the Russian nationalists who thought of themselves as Malorossy, the name Maloross had a “proud sound.” They competed with the Ukrainian nationalists for the cultural inheritance of Little Russia, claiming for themselves many key figures from the Ukrainian pantheon, including Shevchenko, and declaring them to be Little Russian.⁴¹ The KCRN saw itself as the true voice of the Little Russians:

“I myself am a pure-blooded Maloross and love my country passionately, its wonderful nature, its customs, language, and legends, its history, just as I love the Khokhly with their laziness and their good-heartedness. But with my whole strength I hate the Ukrainophiles, this traitorous and vile movement.”

This was written a number of times by the leader of the club in the pages of Kievlianin.⁴²

From a certain time, the KCRN claimed a leadership role for itself among the Russian nationalists in the whole state. This claim was based, among other things, on its electoral successes:

“While the Great Russian gubernias returned a significant number of revolutionaries even to the third State Duma, Little Russia sent thoroughly Russian nationalists to the Tauride Palace. And while Great Russian Moscow and St. Petersburg served as the bulwark of revolution, Kyiv, the center of Little Russia, became the center of the whole Russian patriotic movement.”⁴³

Compared with the first half of the nineteenth century, the discourse concerning the Little Russians had now definitely changed. If the previous concern had been to “rediscover” the “Russian character” of the Little Russians, which had been suppressed and displaced through Polish influences, there was now hardly any mention of Polish influence at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the Russian character of the Little Russians was taken for granted (or imagined) as naturally given. Although this Russian character had to be “protected” from the “poisonous influence” of Ukrainian propaganda, the Little Russian variety of the Russian character was claimed to be even more “solid” than the Great Russian variety, which succumbed all too easily to the temptations of revolutionary ideas and the deceptive imaginings of minority milieus from the periphery of the empire.

The rise in the electoral strength of right-wing Russian nationalists,⁴⁴ especially the KCRN, forced the Cadets to search for allies against the right among the supporters of the Ukrainian movement in the Southwestern Province. This cooperation was primarily tactical, since both sides had very different ideas about the “Ukrainian question” and problems of autonomy and federalism in the empire.⁴⁵ However, driven by the logic of party competition, the Cadets took on certain demands from the Ukrainian camp and intervened in the State Duma on behalf of the oppressed Ukrainians. The KCRN, on the other hand, whenever the government took action against the Ukrainian movement, called persistently for the suppression of the Ukrainian movement. It was against this background that both the KCRN and the TUP sought to influence public opinion in both capital cities regarding the Little Russians and the Ukrainian question.

Right-wing representatives from the Southwestern Province liked to allow peasant deputies to speak in the Duma as if they were speaking on behalf of the whole Little Russian peasantry. Hryhorii A. Andriichuk, a deputy from the Podilia gubernia, declared:

“We reject all Ukrainophile propaganda, as we have never considered ourselves non-Russian. With whatever insidiousness the self-ingratiating Mr. Miliukov and his consorts may attempt to sow discord between us and the Russians, they will not succeed. We Little Russians are just as Russian as the Great Russians.”⁴⁶

The most effective propaganda coup of the anti-Ukrainian Little Russians in Kyiv was a book published in 1912 by the Kyiv censor Sergei N. Shchegolev under the title The Ukrainian Movement as the Modern Stage of South Russian Separatism. Four editions of the book were published before the revolution, and Shchegolev, following the first, more detailed edition, published a shorter version, better suited for propaganda purposes. It contained a wealth of material (in this respect, the book still remains the most detailed account of the Ukrainian movement at the time) and attempted to demonstrate, with numerous quotations, the separatist nature of the Ukrainian movement.

Petr Struve had broken with his fellow Cadets over the Ukrainian question, rejecting even a tactical alliance with the Ukrainian movement.⁴⁷ But in the case of Struve, as in that of Shchegolev, we find in that same year a tendency to legalize the concept “Ukrainian” and reinterpret it, inasmuch as it was used as a synonym for “Little Russian”:

“I am deeply convinced that a Little Russian or Ukrainian culture, as a local provincial culture, exists alongside the all-Russian culture and the all-Russian language.”⁴⁸

The Ukrainian camp very quickly concluded that it had to come up with an answer to Shchegolev in order to neutralize the propagandistic effect of his book in the imperial capitals.⁴⁹ Petro Stebnytsky and Oleksandr Lototsky, both influential figures in Ukrainian circles in St. Petersburg, put together a thick brochure that was published anonymously in St. Petersburg in 1914 under the title The Ukrainian Question. This text, directed at liberal readers in the capital, is interesting inasmuch as it consciously sought to adapt not only the ideological content but also the conceptual system to the reader. The terms “Little Russia,” Khokhol, and Katsap are used without any of the negative connotations typical of the internal Ukrainian discourse. “Little Russia” and “Little Russian” are used repeatedly where, in the internal discourse, “Ukrainian” would most likely have been used.⁵⁰ The authors attempt to demonstrate that assimilation in Ukraine had been only superficially successful and that the low level of literacy was a consequence of the fact that classes were held in what, for the people, was a foreign (Russian) language. They called for a halt to police persecution of the Ukrainian movement, since it was not questioning the territorial integrity of the empire but only struggling for autonomy. The concepts “Little Russia” and “Ukraine” were thereby not only being raised for discussion and reflection in the hostile political camp but were also being used to analyze and manipulate the conceptual system of their opponents.

The attitudes of various political forces to the Ukrainian question were most clearly expressed during a debate in the State Duma in February 1914, when deputies questioned the actions of the police against Ukrainian celebrations on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Taras Shevchenko. The fact that the question had been signed by some dozens of deputies from different parties indicated that a relatively broad coalition had been formed in the Duma that was prepared to support certain demands of the Ukrainians. Miliukov, the main speaker for the Cadets, called on the government to seek an agreement with the moderate Ukrainian leaders who were prepared to accept autonomy within Russia in order not to play into the hands of the more radical Ukrainian nationalists such as Dmytro Dontsov, who were strongly anti-Russian. Savenko was Miliukov’s main opponent from the right and argued that the “moderate” view of Mykhailo Hrushevsky and other Ukrainian representatives was nothing but a tactic and that concessions would inevitably lead to an escalation of Ukrainian demands. Savenko demanded that “the police and the interior minister not be hindered in their work.”⁵¹ Some years later, in the emigration, Miliukov once against accused the Russian “nationalist intelligentsia,”’ who, in alliance with the state authorities after 1863, had gradually damaged relations with all the various peoples of the empire, including the Ukrainians.⁵² What one can say now is that, in the situation at the time, on the eve of the First World War, both speakers made comprehensible arguments. Miliukov was correct in pointing out that the policy of the right depended essentially on administrative measures. Savenko argued that the Ukrainians would not be satisfied with the concessions that Miliukov was willing to grant them. Miliukov himself was very well aware of this. By insisting in talks with his Ukrainian allies that, given the current relation of forces, they had to concentrate on practical measures, he was evading discussion of such contradictions. He attempted to persuade his Ukrainian partners that questions on which agreement could not be reached at that time would be resolved without difficulty after the overthrow of the autocracy. His expectation that the monarchy would collapse turned out to be perfectly accurate, as was his assessment that this would fundamentally change the nature of the Ukrainian question. What he did not foresee, however, was that the monarchy, and with it the empire, would collapse in such a manner that there would be no place in Russia either for his opponents, Savenko and his KCRN colleagues, or for his own partners, Chykalenko and his TUP colleagues, or for himself.

The First World War

On the eve of the First World War, the imperial authorities and the majority of the right and centrist forces represented in the Duma had no clear policy toward Ukraine. They did not want to exacerbate the tensions with the Ukrainians but, on the other hand, they had no idea how to reach an agreement with them. The great mass of the population on the territory of present-day Ukraine was remote from politics and had no pronounced national consciousness.⁵³ In Russia, Ukraine was seen as a threatened part of the imperial periphery and, at the same time, as a threatened part of national territory. In Ukraine/Little Russia, the struggle between the Ukrainian national movement and Russian nationalism intensified, with the latter finding support among the anti-Ukrainian Little Russians. In light of a certain thaw in Russian relations with Poland, especially with Roman Dmowski’s National Democratic Party, Polish intrigue was no longer seen as playing the main role. This now shifted to German and Austrian machinations. Galicia, which had become a bulwark of the Ukrainian movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, was seen as playing a key role. At the same time, there were also strong Russophile circles in Galicia that were close to the anti-Ukrainian Little Russians in the Russian part of Ukraine. In Vienna, Galicia was similarly seen as a threatened borderland, as portrayed so vividly by Joseph Roth in his Radetzky March.

The approaching war inevitably mobilized nationalists throughout the Russian Empire, especially in the western periphery. The irredentists made Russian nationalist plans for the “liberation of Russian land from the Austro-Polish and German yoke.” When Struve, in his famous article of 1914, “Great Russia and Holy Rus’,” formulated Russia’s tasks in the war, the top of the list was “to unify and reunite all parts of the Russian nation,” in other words, to annex “Russian Galicia.” Using the language of organic unity typical in nationalist discourse, he employed the metaphor of healing the national body, arguing that the annexation of Galicia was necessary for the “inner healing of Russia,” since “the Little Russian branch, being part of Austria, had created and nourished the hateful so-called ‘Ukrainian’ question.”⁵⁴

The nationalists on the periphery, including the Ukrainians, were attempting feverishly to assess what might be the outcome of the war and thought that the long-hoped-for changes would now be possible.⁵⁵ The situation was radically heightened by the outbreak of war. Most of the peasants became armed soldiers, and millions of people, especially in the western borderlands, were forced out of their normal sphere of life and their traditional locations. The ethnic factor became immensely more important in politics and in mass consciousness.⁵⁶ The daily horrors and harshness of war dispensed with conventional restraints at both the personal and the social level. In this context, it is also important that the neighboring imperial powers, Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, had abandoned conventional limitations that they had followed for many decades in their mutual relations. For a long time, the macrosystem of continental empires in Eastern Europe had rested on the assumption that they would not attempt to destroy one another and depended on one another to manage the legacy of the Polish partitions. In the course of the war, however, which soon assumed the character of an all-out struggle for the very survival of empires, Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg began actively to play the ethnic card to harm their enemies. They incited separatism in the competing powers while instigating repression against disloyal or suspect ethnic groups among their own subjects.⁵⁷ It can be said that the explosive spread of nationalism in the western periphery of the Romanov Empire resulted in general from the hardships of “total war” and in particular from the new competitive policies of the imperial powers.

At the beginning of the war, Russian policy as regards the Ukrainian question was essentially limited to repression of Ukrainian activists. Ukrainian newspapers were closed down, and Hrushevsky, the leader of the movement, was exiled to Simbirsk. As early as the autumn of 1914, the Russian army occupied all of eastern and part of western Galicia.⁵⁸ In their policy toward the Galician Ruthenians, there was a complete lack of coordination among military and civilian officials and the representatives of the Orthodox hierarchy. They each undermined the policies being followed by other branches of the administration. The lack of clear political directives played a key role. In general, officials tended to regard the local inhabitants as Russians and saw the Greek Catholic Church and Ukrainian identity as something external, superficial, imposed by Vienna, the Vatican, and the Poles, but without any support among the population and therefore as something that could be got rid of easily once Russian power had been established. Ideas of this kind led to repression of the Ukrainian language and the Greek Catholic Church. Ukrainian newspapers and printing presses were closed down. Prominent representatives of the Greek Catholic Church were arrested, including the metropolitan, Andrei (Roman Maria Aleksander) Sheptytsky. This provoked anti-Russian sentiment among the local Ukrainian population. Defeats in the summer of 1915 forced the Russian army to withdraw from Galicia. More than a hundred thousand Russophile Galicians, who feared repression by Austrian officials and forced conscription into the Austro-Hungarian army, also fled with the Russians. The occupying Central Powers supported the Ukrainian nationalists and suppressed Russian nationalists in the occupied territories.⁵⁹ Under these changed circumstances, Russia now had to struggle to win the loyalty and sympathy of the Ukrainians, while Germany, which had a free hand in the Ukrainian question since there were no Ukrainians in the German Empire, now joined the list of players in the Ukrainian question alongside Poland, Vienna, and the Vatican.

Shortly before the second planned occupation of Galicia in 1916, the Russian agent Vsevolod P. Svatkovsky, who was active in Bern and had some influence on Russian policy in Ukraine, made an analysis of the experience of the first occupation. He considered it a serious mistake that “in 1914–15, relying on the support of Russophile political circles in Galicia and of the nonpolitical majority of the Russo-Galician population, we not only completely neglected the Ukrainians and Ukrainianism but let them know, in the clearest possible manner, what our feelings and intentions were.”⁶⁰ “The almost complete disappearance of Ukrainian separatism at the beginning was interpreted as proof of the weakness of Ukrainianism and the strength of the Russophile elements in the region, which, however, was not the true cause of this phenomenon. We had not noticed the chief factor in the political life of the Russian population in this region, namely its Polonophobia. For this population, Russian occupation had put an end to Polish rule. Hostility among Ukrainian circles in Galicia to Russia and to the ‘Muscovites’ existed more in theory, while their hostility to the Poles was a traditional phenomenon replete with practical political and economic implications. This hostility was the strongest characteristic of the whole Russian population of the region, our own as well as that of the Ukrainian camp.”⁶¹ Svatkovsky criticized Bishop Yevlogii and other persecutors of the Greek Catholics, whose repressive policies had turned the Ukrainians against Russia.⁶²

Russian foreign agents paid close attention to changes in Vienna’s and Berlin’s Ukrainian policy. They reported not only on the repressive measures against Russophile Ruthenians at the beginning of the war, including the creation of internment camps at Thalerhof and Theresienstadt, where tens of thousands were detained and thousands died, but also on their concessions to the Ukrainians. For the first time since the 1870s, a non-Polish governor was appointed, General Hermann Kolar, who ordered his officials to respect the Ukrainian language.⁶³ The Austrian heir to the throne, Karl, then made a journey to Galicia during which he greeted the Ukrainians in their own language. Ukrainians were now frequently promoted to officer rank in the Austro-Hungarian army. Svatkovsky was also of the opinion that Hungary had its own Ukrainian policy, the goal of which was to bring all the Ukrainian territories within the Habsburg Monarchy under its rule in a kind of autonomy based on the Croatian model. This could then serve as a strong bastion against Russia.⁶⁴

St. Petersburg was particularly concerned about reports of prisoner-of-war camps erected by the Germans and Austrians where Russian soldiers of Ukrainian origin were separated from the rest and received preferential treatment.⁶⁵ There is a special file in the archives of the Special Political Department of the Foreign Ministry⁶⁶ with statements from soldiers who had escaped from the prisoner-of-war camps, as well as a report from a chargé d’affaires in Bern, Mikhail M. Bibikov, who had succeeded in visiting two of those camps in Rastatt and Salzwedel. Bibikov estimated that about four hundred thousand men were being held there. Provisions were “much better than in the Russian camps.” The soldiers knew that their privileged treatment was due to the fact that they were Ukrainians. They were being given classes in reading and writing in the usual Galician phonetic orthography. They also had lessons in Ukrainian history and literature. There were even Ukrainian newspapers. According to Bibikov’s report, there were around forty thousand men who were particularly receptive to this propaganda and were being trained as members of a future Ukrainian army, engaging in maneuvers in special Ukrainian uniforms. “This propaganda,” wrote Bibikov, “has a solid foundation. The results achieved are very satisfactory.”⁶⁷

The Special Political Department of the Foreign Ministry, originally created to influence the Slavs in Austria-Hungary, soon made the Ukrainian question one of its priorities. In addition to monitoring the policy of hostile powers, it worked on proposals for changing Russian policy. St. Petersburg now began seriously to discuss possible measures to secure the goodwill of the Ukrainians. In the summer of 1915, Mykhailo Tyshkevych, an estate owner from the Kyiv gubernia who saw himself as Ukrainian, socially conservative and loyal to the empire and its rulers, sent a declaration of loyalty by telegram to the tsar. Nicholas II replied, on 24 August 1915, in a telegram signed by Court Minister Vladimir B. Frederiks:

“Sa Majesté m’a donné l’ordre de vous remercier ainsi que le groupe d’Ukrainiens réunis en Suisse pour les sentiments exprimés dans votre télégramme.”⁶⁸

The revolutionary significance of this telegram for official discourse consists in the fact that the word “Ukrainian” is used in an official document instead of the previously obligatory “Little Russian,” in what sounds like a direct quotation from the ruler himself. At the end of 1915, Hrushevsky was permitted to move from faraway Simbirsk to the university city of Kazan. The possibility of opening two Ukrainian secondary schools was discussed, and there were plans for the successor to the throne, accompanied by his orderly, the Little Russian Derevenko, to visit Galicia when the province was occupied again. Recommendations were made on how to handle the Greek Catholic Church, stressing the need to refrain from repressive measures of any kind. Lists were made of Ukrainian politicians, including politicians from Galicia, who could be attracted to the Russian side. Recommendations for achieving this stressed the overriding importance of the national question. It was therefore recommended that contact be established with individuals who would be willing to accept autonomy within Russia, and that such contacts should include even Ukrainian socialists of Borot’ba (Struggle), who, although they were “socialists,” were also “altogether decent people.”⁶⁹ Svatkovsky’s opinion was that these concessions could be kept within a tight framework, since the unification of all Ukrainians in one state was so important to Ukrainian leaders that they would be willing to make extensive compromises with the Russian government, given that Russia alone was capable of uniting all the Ukrainian lands.⁷⁰

Svatkovsky clearly thought it important to prepare the ground for an agreement on the Ukrainian question with the Allied powers, especially the United States. In 1916 he sent his agent Tsetlinsky to the USA to make contact with, among others, Ukrainian emigrants living there.⁷¹ It is difficult to assess what further practical steps might have been taken in this revision of Ukrainian policy, as the monarchy was overthrown in February 1917.

The First World War and the Russian Revolution significantly changed the balance of forces in Ukraine. Ukrainian organizations were stronger, often thanks to the support of the warring powers. Armed Ukrainian units had been created, not just in the Austro-Hungarian army (the Ukrainian Legion) but also, following a command from General Lavr Kornilov in the summer of 1917, in the Russian army. At the same time, anti-Ukrainian forces had been significantly weakened. In Galicia this had to do with the exodus of Russophile Ruthenians in 1915 and the repression of Russophiles by Austria-Hungary. In Russian Ukraine, many Russian nationalists either left the areas occupied by the Central Powers in 1915 and 1917–18 or became targets of the occupying powers. In 1916–17 the Bolsheviks in Ukraine sounded the death knell for the Russian nationalists, whom they regarded as the main enemy. Members of the KCRN (more than seventy people) captured by the Bolsheviks when they took Kyiv were shot.

Disputes between the supporters of a Little Russian or Ukrainian orientation continued during the interwar period in the emigration and in Galicia, which now belonged to Poland. In Soviet Ukraine, korenizatsiia (indigenization) represented a radical break with the Ukrainian policy of the Russian Empire and of the Russian nationalists.⁷² The concept of the all-Russian nation, which was supposed to embrace Great, Little and White Russians, was rejected, and the very notion of Maloross was forbidden. The Ukrainian nation was recognized by the Soviet authorities, taking territorial shape in the form of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which conducted an intensive policy of Ukrainization during the 1920s.

Endnotes

1. Zenon E. Kohut, Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy: Imperial Аbsorption of the Hetmanate, 1760s–1830s (Cambridge, Mass., 1988); Zenon E. Kohut, “The Ukrainian Elite in the Eighteenth Century and Its Integration into the Russian Nobility,” in The Nobility in Russia and Eastern Europe, ed. Ivo Banac and Paul Bushkovitch (New Haven, Conn., 1983), 65–97; Zapadnye okrainy Rossiiskoi imperii, ed. Mikhail Dolbilov and Alexei Miller (Moscow, 2006).
2. David Saunders, The Ukrainian Impact on Russian Culture, 1750–1850 (Edmonton, 1985).
3. From an administrative viewpoint, the border remained in place throughout the nineteenth century. The territories on the Right Bank constituted the Kyiv gubernia, while in the mid-nineteenth century a form of administration was established on the Left Bank that was characteristic of the Great Russian gubernias. For a long time, there were no zemstvo administrations on the Right Bank. They were first introduced in 1911. To a large extent, this had to do with the dominant status of Polish estate owners, something entirely lacking on the Left Bank.
4. This included the territories north of the Black Sea, which, up to that point, had belonged to the Ottoman Empire and fell to Russia after the Russo-Ottoman war of 1768–74.
5. Cf. P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Kirillo-Mefodievskoe obshchestvo (1846–1847) (Moscow, 1959); Alexei Miller, The Ukrainian Question: The Russian Empire and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (New York and Budapest, 2003).
6. For a detailed discussion, see Alexei Miller, The Romanov Empire and Nationalism: Essays in the Methodology of Historical Research (New York and Budapest, 2008), 67–92.
7. For the text of the instruction, see A. E. Miller, Ukrainskii vopros v politike vlastei i russkom obshchestvennom mnenii (St. Petersburg, 2000).
8. On the text of the ukase, see Miller, Ukrainskii vopros v politike vlastei.
9. For more detail, see Miller, The Ukrainian Question.
10. For more detail, see A. Kotenko, O. Martyniuk, and A. Miller, “Maloros,” in A. Miller, D. Zdvizhkov, and I. Shirle, Osnovnye obshchestvenno-politicheskie poniatiia v Rossii 18–nachala 20 v. (Moscow, 2011).
11. See B. N. Mironov, Sotsial’naia istoriia Rossii, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1999), 22–25.
12. National Library of Russia, Manuscript Department, fond 600, d. 1333, 28ff.
13. Daniel Beauvois, Walka o ziemię 1863–1914. Pogranicze (Sejny, 1996), 281; S. M. Sambuk, Politika tsarizma v Belorussii vo vtoroi polovine XIX v. (Minsk, 1980), 154.
14. P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia na rubezhe 1870–1880 godov (Moscow, 1964), 425.
15. Steven G. Marks, “Conquering the Great East: Kulomzin, Peasant Resettlement, and the Creation of Modern Siberia,” in Rediscovering Russia in Asia: Siberia and the Russian Far East, ed. Stephen Kotkin and David Wolff (New York and London, 1995), 23–39.
16. S. I. Bruk and V. M. Kabuzan, “Chislennost’ i rasselenie ukrainskogo ėtnosa v XVIII–nachale XX v.,” Sovetskaia ėtnografiia, 1981, no. 5, table 3, 20–22.
17. Ibid., table 4, 23.
18. Andreas Kappeler, “Chochly und Kleinrussen: Die ukrainische ländliche und städtische Diaspora in Russland vor 1917,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 45, no. 1 (1997): 58; A. A. Novoselova, “Sibirskie khokhly: k voprosu ob ėtnicheskoi prinadlezhnosti,” Ėtnografiia Altaia i sopredel’nykh territorii (Barnaul), no. 5 (2003): 27–28; A. A. Novoselova, “Ukraintsy v Srednem Priirtysh’e: identifikatsiia i samoidentifikatsiia v kontse 19–nachale 20 v.,” in Ukraina-Zapadnaia Sibir’: dialog kul’tur i narodov (Tiumen, 2004), 51–62; A. A. Novoselova, “Potomki belorusskikh pereselentsev v derevniakh Srednego i Nizhnego techeniia reki Tary,” in Ėtnokul’turnye vzaimodeistviia v Sibiri (17–20 vv.) (Novosibirsk, 2003), 267.
19. Bruk and Kabuzan, “Chislennost’ i rasselenie,” 26, 30.
20. Patricia Herlihy, “Ukrainian Cities in the Nineteenth Century,” in Rethinking Ukrainian History, ed. Ivan L. Rudnytsky (Edmonton, 1981), 136–37.
21. Peter Woroby, “The Role of the City in Ukrainian History,” in Rethinking Ukrainian History, 208.
22. RGIA, fond 733, op. 193 (1863), d. 86, 20. Mikhail Katkov, describing in 1865 what he considered the most important measures for the Russification of the Kyiv gubernia, listed as number one the creation of a rail link between the Volga and the Dnipro. See M. N. Katkov, Sobranie peredovykh statei “Moskovskikh vedomostei” 1865 goda (Moscow, 1897), 757.
23. Cf. Ben Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture and Popular Pedagogy, 1861–1914 (Berkeley, 1986), 89, 94.
24. Statements by Yevhen Chykalenko, one of the key figures in the Ukrainian movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, are typical: “Every city and every large area in Ukraine has been frightfully Russified”: Ievhen Chykalenko, Shchodennyk, vol. 1, 1907–1917 (Kyiv, 2004), 281–82; “What you can do now with a few thousand, you will not be able to do then with millions when the people have become Russian”: Ievhen Chykalenko and Petro Stebnyts’kyi, Lystuvannia, 1901–1922 roky (Kyiv, 2008), 72.
25. Steven Guthier, “Ukrainian Cities during the Revolution and the Interwar Era,” in Rethinking Ukrainian History, 159.
26. Chykalenko, Shchodennyk, 1: 47–48.
27. Outside the direct influence of the TUP there was a small number of groupings of more radical nationalists such as Dmytro Dontsov and Mykola Mikhnovsky, who openly called for the overthrow of the Russian Empire and the creation of an ethnic Ukrainian state.
28. Heorhii Kas’ianov, Ukraïns’ka intelihentsiia na rubezi XIX–XX stolit’. Sotsial’no-politychnyi portret (Kyiv, 1993), 49. There is a clear record of publishing activity on the part of Ukrainian activists: by 1914 they had brought out 100,000 calendars, 200,000 copies of Shevchenko’s Kobzar, and 10,000 copies of Hrushevsky’s Illustrated History of Ukraine. Chykalenko’s agricultural brochures were also widely distributed.
29. The founders and members of the club thought of themselves as Little Russians. At the beginning of the First World War, the club was the most influential Russian nationalist organization in Kyiv, if not in the whole of Russia. The history of the club has not been adequately researched, which has to do with the fact that the club was one of the first targets of the Bolsheviks after they came to power in Kyiv (seventy members were shot), and the archive was confiscated by the Cheka.
30. Ricarda Vulpius, “Ukrainskii iazyk i shkol’noe obuchenie v pozdneimperskii period,” Ab Imperio, 2005, no. 2 http://abimperio.net/.
31. For its election program, see Sbornik kluba russkikh natsionalistov (Kyiv, 1910), 27–30.
32. Emotionally loaded terms for the anti-Ukrainian Little Russians abound in Chykalenko’s journals: “hostile pseudo-countrymen” (93, 306), “traitors” (142), “corrupted by Moscow” (340), “our converts who now call themselves Russian nationalists” (256) (Chykalenko, Shchodennyk, vol. 1).
33. A reference to Hetman Ivan Mazepa (1639–1709) and a derogatory term for a “disloyal” Ukrainian.
34. There are numerous examples in the collected writings of anti-Ukrainian journalists: Ukrainskii separatizm v Rossii (Moscow, 1998); Ukrainskaia bolezn’ russkoi natsii (Moscow, 2004). Savenko made the following assessment of the German orientation of the Ukrainian camp: “The alliance of Ukrainomanes with the Germans is nothing new. The German tendency of the Mazepintsy started when relations between Russia and Germany cooled. And when two armed coalitions confronted each other in Europe, the Dual Alliance and the Triple Alliance, then the Ukrainomanes finally attached themselves to militaristic Germanness…. The whole plan of the Ukrainophiles, the creation of an independent Ukraine, rests on the external defeat of Russia. In the same way, Mazepa placed his hopes in Sweden and Charles XII” (A. Savenko, “Zametki,” Kievlianin, no. 38, 7 February 1909).
35. “To have a clear idea about the Mazepintsy, one should not forget for a minute the dual character of this movement. On the one hand, they play with quasi-national feelings, inasmuch as they present themselves as passionate nationalists of the Ukrainian nation recently invented in Austria. On the other hand, these gentlemen are demagogues of the most sinister kind in the pure Haidamaky manner. When not afraid to say so, many of them, socialists and cosmopolitans, flout every nation, the Ukrainian included…. For this reason, they are prepared to subject themselves to the Austrians, the Germans, even to the devil himself. Since their true slogan is ‘Have-nots of the world, unite,’ these have-nots belong to the revolutionary socialist parties and form one of their offshoots” (“Mazepinskaia opasnost’,” Kievlianin, no. 60, 1 March 1914).
36. See, e.g., Chykalenko’s letter of 16 April 1906 to Stebnytsky, in which he writes that among the deputies to the State Duma “there were very few conscious Ukrainians, but of course many of Ukrainian origin” (Chykalenko and Stebnyts’kyi, Lystuvannia, 44).
37. A derogatory Ukrainian term for Russians.
38. Chykalenko, Shchodennyk, 320.
39. Stebnyts’kyi, “Ukraïna v ekonomitsi Rosiï,” in Vybrani tvory (Kyiv, 2009), 280.
40. Chykalenko, Shchodennyk, vol. 1 (Kyiv, 2004), 281–82.
41. Shevchenko’s status would decline from “genius” to “talented poet” in the discourse of the KCRN, and his symbolic role as “father of the nation” was played down. Cf. Kievlianin, no. 116, 27 April 1908.
42. A. I. Savenko, “Zametki,” Kievlianin, no. 134, 15 May 1908. This formula, created by Nikolai Rigelman and Sylvestr Hohotsky in the 1870s, became a kind of mantra in anti-Ukrainian Little Russian journalism. As Professor T. Lokot formulated it: “As a son of the Little Russian branch of the Russian family, I love everything Little Russian: the living Little Russian language (not the Ukrainian in which there is so much that is artificial and non-Little Russian), the Little Russian nature and, most important of all, the Little Russian people.” See T. Lokot’, “Kak byt’ s ukrainstvom,” Golos Moskvy, no. 277, 2 December 1911.
43. A. I. Savenko, “Zametki. Po povodu 100-letiia so dnia rozhdeniia Gogolia,” Kievlianin, no. 320, 16 November 1908.
44. The political right in Russia was organizationally very divided. The largest organizations were the All-Russian National Union, the Union of the Russian People, the Union of the Archangel Michael, and the Black Hundred groups. Their programs were characterized by xenophobia, monarchism, and frequently by hostility to constitutionalism. The Union of 17 October represented the center right. It supported the constitutional reforms of the October Manifesto but differed from the Cadets on the issue of concessions to demands for autonomy from the nationalists on the imperial periphery. To date there has been only one monograph on the right-wing movements: Daniil Kotsiubinskii, Russkii natsionalizm v nachale stoletiia: rozhdenie i gibel’ ideologii Vserossiiskogo natsional’nogo soiuza (Moscow, 2001). The Kyiv Club of Russian Nationalists brought together a broad spectrum extending from the center right to the extremist supporters of the Black Hundreds.
45. While the Ukrainians insisted on national autonomy as a first step and really wanted to achieve that status within a federation, the Cadets not only rejected federalism in principle for Russia but also rejected national autonomy. What the Cadets preferred was territorial autonomy, whereby territorial units would be smaller and their borders would not be determined by national or ethnic criteria.
46. Gosudarstvennaia Duma, Tretii sozyv. Stenograficheskie otchety. 1909, vol. 3 (St. Petersburg, 1910), col. 3081. “We are Russians, and no one has the right to call us anything else,” said the peasant deputy Matvii Andriichuk from the Volhynia gubernia a year later. He was almost the namesake of his colleague from Podilia: see Gosudarstvennaia Duma, Tretii sozyv. Stenograficheskie otchety. Sessiia chetvertaia, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1910), col. 1280.
47. But Struve criticized the “reactionaries” who “shout about ‘Mazepa treachery’ and paint a frightening picture of an Austro-Polish-Ukrainian war against Russia to separate Ukraine from Russia.” See P. B. Struve, “Obshcherusskaia kul’tura i ukrainskii partikuliarizm. Otvet Ukraintsu,” Russkaia mysl’, 1912, no. 1: 85.
48. P. B. Struve, ‘Obshcherusskaia kultura i ukrainskii partikuliarizm,’ 66.
49. Chykalenko and Stebnytsky discussed who should reply to Shchegolev that “Ukrainianism is not the result of some intrigue but rather, like the rebirth of any nation, has grown organically” (Chykalenko and Stebnyts’kyi, Lystuvannia, 284).
50. Stebnyts’kyi, Vybrani tvory, 290–308. “Little Russia” and “Ukraine” are often used as synonyms, separated by a comma (ibid., 313).
51. Gosudarstvennaia Duma, IV sozyv. Sessiia II. Stenograficheskie otchety. Chast’ II. Zasedaniie 40. 19 February 1914 (St. Petersburg, 1914), cols. 901–15, 927–33.
52. P. N. Miliukov, Natsional’nyi vopros. Proiskhozhdenie natsional’nosti i natsional’nye voprosy v Rossii (Prague, 1925), 154.
53. The only Ukrainian daily newspaper, Rada, with a more or less constant subscriber base of two thousand between 1908 and 1911, was only able to increase the number of its subscribers to three thousand before the war. The right-wing Russian nationalist organizations had tens of thousands of members, for instance, in Volhynia. The membership of Black Hundred organizations exceeded one hundred thousand. These numbers, however, can be deceptive. Peasant membership was often purely formal and reflected the monarchism and anti-Semitism of these organizations rather than conscious support for Russian nationalism.
54. Russkaia mysl’, 1914, no. 12: 176–80.
55. For the Poles, the First World War meant reunification and independence for Poland. For the Ukrainians, the war also strengthened the idea of unifying all of what they considered to be Ukrainian territory. The Armenians hoped to gain eastern Anatolia with the help of the Entente, and the Jews and Baltic Germans hoped for a German victory. All nationalists in the Russian Empire hoped that the autocracy would be replaced by a democratic system and that centralization would give way to autonomy or federalism. Some Muslims had the idea of a pan-Muslim or pan-Turkic union.
56. Mark von Hagen, “The Great War and the Mobilization of Ethnicity,” in Post-Soviet Political Order: Conflict and State Building, ed. Barnett R. Rubin and Jack Snyder (London, 1998), 34–57.
57. See especially Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).
58. On occupation policy, see the book by Aleksandra Bakhturina, which, though questionable in its analysis, is rich in factual detail: Politika Rossiiskoi imperii v Vostochnoi Galitsii v gody Pervoi Mirovoi voiny (Moscow, 2000). See also Mark von Hagen, War in a European Borderland: Occupations and Occupation Plans in Galicia and Ukraine, 1914–1918 (Seattle and London, 2007); Miller, The Romanov Empire, chap. 7.
59. Cf. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge, 2000); Frank Grelka, Die ukrainische Nationalbewegung unter deutscher Besatzungsherrschaft 1918 und 1941/42 (Wiesbaden, 2005). Compared to the earlier policy of the Russian Empire, quite revolutionary measures were taken, especially in relation to the Ukrainian language. Following an order from Marshal Hindenburg, the language of the local inhabitants (Polish, Lithuanian, and Belarusian) was to be respected in Ober Ost, while Russian was to be prohibited in the press, education, and administration. The hierarchy of languages in the Russian Empire was turned on its head. Of course, this had no immediate effect on the spread of particular languages, but it did have important symbolic consequences. For the first time, knowledge of the languages of the periphery became a real advantage. A similar policy was followed in Ukraine.
60. AVPRI, fond 135, op. 474, d. 27, 4.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., 4–6.
63. On Vienna’s policy toward the Ukrainians in Galicia and Bukovyna, see Serhii Popyk, Ukraïntsi v Avstriï 1914–1918. Avstriis’ka polityka v ukraïns’komu pytanni periodu Velykoï viiny (Kyiv and Chernivtsi, 1999); Ereignisse in der Ukraine, 1914–1922: deren Bedeutung und historische Hintergründe, ed. Theophil Hornykiewycz, 4 vols. (Philadelphia, 1966–69). See also chapter 1b in the present volume.
64. АVPRI, fond 135, op. 474, d. 27, 8.
65. Ibid., 44–61.
66. Ibid., 26.
67. Ibid., 6ff. See also chapters 1b and 3b in the present volume.
68. Translation: “His Majesty has given me the task of expressing his thanks to you and to the group of Ukrainians in Switzerland for the sentiments expressed in your telegram” (АVPRI, fond 135, op. 474, d. 27, 12).
69. Ibid., 48–55.
70. АVPRI, fond 135, op. 474, d. 32, 3.
71. АVPRI, fond 135, op. 474, d. 27, 60–61.
72. Cf. Miller, The Romanov Empire, chap. 7 and Conclusion.

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Chapter 4a (298-320) from The Emergence of Ukraine: Self-Determination, Occupation, and War in Ukraine, 1917-1922, by Wolfram Dornik, Georgiy Kasianov, Hannes Leidinger, Peter Lieb, Alexei Miller, Bogdan Musial, and Vasyl Rasevych (University of Alberta Press, 05.11.2022), published by OAPEN under the terms of an Open Access license.